Karatsuba

I’ve enrolled in Stanford Professor Tim Roughgarden’s Coursera MOOC on the design and analysis of algorithms, and while he covers the theory and intuition behind the algorithms in a surprising amount of detail, we’re left to implement them in a programming language of our choice.

And I’m ging to post Python code for all the algorithms covered during the course!

The Karatsuba Multiplication Algorithm

Karatsuba’s algorithm reduces the multiplication of two n-digit numbers to at most single-digit multiplications in general (and exactly when n is a power of 2). Although the familiar grade school algorithm for multiplying numbers is how we work through multiplication in our day-to-day lives, it’s slower () in comparison, but only on a computer, of course!

Here’s how the grade school algorithm looks:(The following slides have been taken from Tim Roughgarden’s notes. They serve as a good illustration. I hope he doesn’t mind my sharing them.)

…and this is how Karatsuba Multiplication works on the same problem:

A More General Treatment

Let and be represented as -digit strings in some base. For any positive integer less than , one can write the two given numbers as

,

where and are less than . The product is then

where

These formulae require four multiplications, and were known to Charles Babbage. Karatsuba observed that can be computed in only three multiplications, at the cost of a few extra additions. With and as before we can calculate

which holds since

A more efficient implementation of Karatsuba multiplication can be set as , where .

Example

To compute the product of 12345 and 6789, choose B = 10 and m = 3. Then we decompose the input operands using the resulting base (Bm = 1000), as:

12345 = 12 · 1000 + 345

6789 = 6 · 1000 + 789

Only three multiplications, which operate on smaller integers, are used to compute three partial results: